Brown speculates around the problematic notion of never losing touch with anyone in environments such as Facebook. Most notably losing the 'right to lose touch' and maintaining the convenience of a clever address book albeit the inanity of one that constantly talks back at you...

Over a half decade into the life of the social web, services still represent 'friending' autistically, preventing us from ascribing the subtlety and meaning of real relationships to their digital counterparts. The dynamic and changing semantics of a relationship are intrinsic to our existence and yet most services are content to flatten them all into a simple 'friend soup', diminishing them all and stripping each of its unique values.

Services should understand that certain people are more important to me that others, based on the history of a relationship - whether that's proximity, temporal distance, frequency of contact, family connections or shared work histories. Right now, users have to do that heavy-lifting themselves, but Brown's notion of a Fade Utility for digital relationships isn't so far fetched...

Stevenn Blyth's Social Fabricproject began to explore how to represent the decay of a relationship over time and distance by visualising the relative 'healthiness' of your relationships. The emotional representation of a friend's avatar would subtley signal whether that relationship needed your care and attention.

Perhaps in the age of iPhones and the emergence of federated social networks its now possible to concieve of a user experience that not as rich as Social Fabric, but one that can understand your actual activity - email, phone calls, messages, events, travel plans - and make some guesses about whom in your social networks you're neglecting, which relationships need some attention and let others face into the background with less prominence.

One of the things I love about my Mac is the 'All Windows' feature of Exposé. I've gotten into the habit of squeezing my Mighty Mouse's side buttons to invoke Exposé, but y'know that's only for application windows.

With most of my day spend inside various web applications, what'd I'd find really useful is for all my open Firefox tabs to pop out when exposéd.

Firefox 3 promises visual integration with the platform its running on - whether XP, Vista, OS X or Linux - but perhaps what's required is interactional integration, harnessing the host platform's unique UI features not just its appearance.

There's a lotta talk about the 'next billion' mobile customers, largely from the developing world, but very little real empirical study of what those users might need. Contrast Doom-playingOLPCs with the work of The Fonly Institute...

Chipchase and Tulusan's field study of Ugandan mobile, this past July, documents some very revealing observations...

Phone borrowing is is driven by cost and price sensitivity.

Phone lending is driven by hospitality, personal relationships and community well-being.

The notion of 'sente', using prepay airtime as a form of cheap, secure and convenient banking.

Employing missed calls - 'beeping and flashing' - as a form of free messaging.

Phones as community ATMs.

Pooling prepay credit between customers when sufficiently small prepay denominations are available.

Mediated Calls - where literacy becomes a barrier to participation.

Community address books to encourage repeat business and conveniently recall commonly dialled numbers.

Step messaging - physically carrying a phone containing a message to its recipient...

Chipchase and Tulusan conclude that sharing is driven by cost, but that low costs lowers the propensity to share; with initial experiences governed by sharing, they also conclude that this may shape future usage. It'll be interesting to see how individual ownership might affect social cohesion and mobile usage in the very same communities.

What's striking about the research is that all the observed innovations in shared usage are a result of user inventiveness, rather than handset design or network services; a case of user-generated services that really serve the needs of the consumer...if the mobile industry paid closer attention to such innovation, it might provide that 'next billion' users with the tools they actually need.

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BTW, during a vacation in Pakistan this year, I noticed that a lot of people carried 2-3 handsets and SIMs as tools to mediate their friendships, family and professional availabilty...

With it's AJAX-ian user interface, remixable maps and numerous mashups and spinoffs, Google Maps kickstarted the current wave of innovation in UI design and locative media. MSN and Yahoo predicatably leapt into the fray with their own competing services, however it's worth keeping an eye on old standards like Multimap.

Following a link inside a Wikipedia entry, I discovered that Multimap now cleverly overlays maps onto aerial photos (kinda like Google Maps' Hybrid view) in the area around your pointer....a nice UI touch, providing an intuitive mechanism for juxtaposing map and photo information. It'd be great to see this extended to other locative data such as property values, crime, population and photoblogs.